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If you know the first thing about modern political history in Toronto, you know about the Spadina Expressway Battle. Well, maybe not. I suppose if you know only one thing, it’s probably The Strange and Terrible Saga of Rob Ford.

But if you know the second thing about modern political history in Toronto, you know about the Spadina Expressway Battle. It is the founding myth of urbanist Toronto politics, the story about how Jane Jacobs and a ragtag band of Annex professors, artists, and architects stood up to city hall to stop the construction of a highway that would have leveled their neighbourhood.

At the climax of that story as it’s usually told, Conservative premier Bill Davis famously announced, “If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.”

That was in 1971, but the words seem appropriate to remember today, as we reopen a question it seems we’ve been debating ever since Davis spoke: what to do with the Gardiner Expressway. The unloved but much-travelled elevated highway running parallel to the lakeshore across downtown has been lamented and defended for decades. But now the thing is falling apart, and needs an investment of hundreds of millions no matter which side of that debate we fall on.

The level section west of Exhibition Place, it’s safe to say, is here to stay for our lifetimes. The section right through downtown is under repair now, at significant expense, and has seemed recently to be submerged into the cityscape, ever less an obstacle and eyesore, as condo neighbourhoods have grown up around it.

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But the section east of Jarvis St. is a different matter. It’s travelled by only about 5,000 cars in both directions at peak rush hour, and runs through an area we’re just getting around to developing into neighbourhoods now.

The city is now considering a report on two main options for that eastern section: tearing it down, or replacing it with a “hybrid” realignment that goes only to the Don Valley Expressway.

A former third option, keeping it as-is, was thrown out as too expensive in rebuilding and maintenance costs, and because it would close off development opportunities, importantly redevelopment of the Unilever lands that are one of the lynchpins of John Tory’s SmartTrack plan.

The hybrid option will cost $919 million (more than a third of that upfront) the new report to city council reveals, and will allow development at the Unilever site, but not at some other sites along the corridor between Jarvis and Cherry Sts. Some people — not most, but some coming from the east end — will see their projected commute times increase by an average of three minutes.

The option to tear it down is the cheapest, at $461 million in long-term cost, and would open up massive development opportunities around the port lands. The increase in commute times from the east end — the most extreme inconvenience — is estimated at five minutes, while a three minutes increase is expected for other commuters from other parts of the city.

So the hybrid option would cost almost twice as much — $450 million-plus more — to save about 5,000 people two or three minutes. You could weigh the decision just on those merits, and wonder how much of a time savings that same money would buy the 60,000 people per day who ride the King Streetcar or the 44,000 per day who ride the Jane bus if we invested the same dollars in transit.

But here’s where we come back to Davis’ concept of building a transportation system for people. The “development opportunities” we talk about opening up are neighbourhoods, places for people to live, and work, and shop. And the opportunity to build something dense and magnificent on that land, rather than giving it over to a highway right-of-way, is in my mind a pressing consideration. Of course, there’s no group of modern ragtag activists to stand up for the quality of life in these new neighbourhoods, since for the most part they haven’t been built yet. But the question of what their lives will be like, what their neighbourhoods will be like, with or without an expressway running through it is no less real. We so seldom get the opportunity to build a new neighbourhood downtown. Imagine any downtown neighbourhood you currently care to: if you were starting to build it from scratch, would you run a highway through it? Would that make it a better place to live and work and spend time? What about the people who might have the chance to live there and walk to work in minutes? What is the impact on their travel time of not having the development happen?

Moving around the city is an important consideration, of course. But for most of us, three to five minutes is a rounding error in our commute time — the difference between catching the bus or waiting for the next one, of making it through the yellow or waiting for the lights to change again. The idea of spending a $450 million premium and permanently limiting a developing neighbourhood’s prospects to shave that time off a small number of people’s commutes is absurd.

Though it should be a no-brainer, this is likely to be a heavily debated decision. That’s because, decades after Davis’ famous speech, we still haven’t quite settled on whether we’re actually building a city for cars, or one for people.

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